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SOL: Epitaph of the Quindecennial (primer)
In this primer, various terms and information known throughout the land will be shown to you. This is so you can get a better understanding of the setting and the various dynamics you may face in your empires rise of power, or its own epitaph. If success is what you wish, reading this primer can lead to various advantages over simply running through blind. All info given is scaled to the difficulty chosen (namely Planewave). This guide provides you with some lore as well as ways to make your experience more immersive with the culture set in place to make the world breath more then in a normal campaign. Exploration will yield rewards (and I love sharing information as well) A reminder to players, is that the campaign will actively seek your downfall. Only through shrewd diplomacy, expert tactics and impressive management can you succeed in a land that does not let live and let live. 'Overview' The campaign "The Quindecennial" was the beginning of an adventure of rising nations, forces unimaginiable in a world plagued by visions, all pointing to a second Planewave. In this adventure the players will assume command of a region plagued with sickness, corruption and warring peoples. How they get to this point depends on their choices and actions on the way. Expect groups to despise your choices, neighbouring kingdoms to take advantage of your weakness and for threats not of this world to begin their cruel machinations. Death is possible, and will likely happen to those who do no think of their actions before hand. For a man cannot become a hero without until he can see the root of his downfall. All players are required to give a small paragraph detailing their characters major life actions (e.g. joined the militia, built a farm for him and his family) before boarding the Oriv, as well as giving examples of their characters personality with the following: *Your character is visited by a man, he says his wife is trapped under a tree a mile back. You remember this is bandit country. *You have performed a glorious deed for a local lord, he grants you a choice of boon. Gold, a position in his court or the service of his prized son, who is a trained warrior. *As you walk the streets of a poor district, you become harassed by a man in rags attempting to pluck a song on a lute with no strings. He reaks of dead fish, and has evident bruises. *You happen to become the leader of a mercenary group, another group has just put up a banner calling your group "worthless trash, not worth the two-pay they ask". Your men urge for retribution. *Captaining a ship for the royal navy, you see a ship smoking in the distant horizon. You have been called to search for a dangerous, crafty pirate. The ships sails appear intact, but you cannot be certain at this distance. In addition to the latter, I require two ambitions your character would wish to meet within his lifetime (or for Fig, within the next few hundred years). These do not include survival, not losing hair and are more along the lines of "Own the most prestigous wizarding college in the land" or "Raise my kingdom into relevance". This allows me to adapt certain quests to fulfill your characters desires as well as reward them for when they actively seek to achieve it. 'Alignment' The Solaere setting does not utilise alignments in the traditional sense, rather it uses a simple Mana system which can easily represent any form of character. There are five main colours: Red, Black, Blue, White and Green. Each of these represent various characteristics within a person. Someone who values independence, but is also egotistical may be Red or Red/Black, while someone who believe an enlightened society, crafted by order and hardened by knowledge would be White/Blue. These colours represent the ideals of your character, not their morals such as good and bad. Some simple character archetypes include the druid, whose ideal is to keep the natural order of the wild - which at every facet of itself is Green. While the freedom fighter, striving for his dreams would be Red, as independence and passion are some of the main tenets of Red. The following is a general run down of the basic five colours. Traditional Alignments such as Lawful Good etc, are still kept for spell reasons, but are not moral walls that can never be broken and are quite flexible compared to a standard Dungeons and Dragons campaign. 'Red' Red looks on the world and sees adventure. Life is a chance to experience something - many things - and for Red, there is no more worthwhile endeavor than to enjoy life by the adventure it offers. Experiences are what life is about, and to appreciate the full range of life's experiences, Red lives by emotion. What makes one laugh, what makes one cry, what one hates and what one loves, these make up what person is. A person can look only to these, believes Red, to find one's wishes and desires in life. Deny these, and life is meaningless. To accord with its beliefs, Red seeks out new experiences, and new ways to express itself, and seizes on them. It finds these ends in the complementary pillars of Impulse and Chaos. Impulse, to Red, means emotional action. By acting (doing) as one's heart desires, one can only find happiness with the experience one has to show for it. With Chaos - random action - Red creates the freedom for anyone to express his or her emotions. In a sense, by opening up new possibilities, Red's Chaos frees novel experiences from the "lattice" of the status quo. In valuing emotion and adventure so greatly, what Red truly prizes is freedom. To live life the Red way - passionately and imminently - Red must be able to act on its impulses, doing what it feels each moment without delay. It doesn't want to be censored or controlled, because when one's passions are shackled from action, a person cannot be who he is. To disallow him to be who he is, is to destroy him; in Red's view, censorship is death. As such, the idea of rules, of pinning someone to one course even if his emotions urge him down another, is atrocious to Red. Where Red can see, those who dare to speak of rules and limits will meet with a furious ultimatum to shut up. All of these things often gets Red into trouble, which Red seems to not really care about. Red will fight against anyone who restrains anyone else, and the tools that Red uses to make this point, and those it uses to seek its own richness of passion, are the basis of a Red character. 'Black' Black can be summarized with a well-known phrase: Look out for number one. Black looks on the world and sees just a plain reality: Power controls. Power says who rules, and who dies. And whether the weak can see it or not, they are no more than slaves for the powerful. The essence of Black is to see one's own ego as so supremely invaluable, that this prospect of enslavement, of subordinating that ego to another, is utterly inadmissible. So, to be in accord with its perceptions and beliefs, Black simply must discard all obligations but to acquire power for itself. It can be no less than the one supreme being who is subordinate to no other, the possessor of all power in the universe - it must become omnipotent. In order to reach omnipotence, Black's rule is simply to follow no rule. Life is hard enough without putting limitations on oneself. Black looks for opportunities to get ahead, and seizes them without mercy and without shame. Greed and ambition are the largest players in Black's internal psychology - Greed counters shame, always demanding more; ambition counters humility, never permitting compromise. And of course, killing is no trouble for the color sometimes portrayed as "obsessed with Death." It is fortunate for Black how much the planes are populated with living things (not necessarily true in the multiverse). Living things are naturally subject to terror and despair, weaknesses on which Black thrives mercilessly. Perhaps the most common misconception is that Black represents Evil. Put bluntly, Black is the most likely color to do open, honest evil. It is the element of Sauron, of Dark Lords everywhere, the blunt and the open and the honest. If you decide to go evil, you will be the most noticeable evil in the world. 'Blue' Blue's philosophy, like that of each color, is determined by its world view. To Blue, the world is opportunity. Within it, hide wonders and possibilities most fantastic; the stuff of dreams. Blue is characterized by the desire to know the world's secrets and to make those possibilities real. The belief that dream can be reality - to which Blue holds fast - is belief in tabula rasa, the blank slate. Blue believes that all things begin existence blank, without destiny or purpose. Contrast with the belief that one's life is predetermined, say, by natural ability. Rather, Blue believes the essence of a thing is given to it, that it is shaped by the storms and eddies of its existence. Those with the knowledge and willpower are masters of this: shaping and changing things at will. To them, essence is as malleable as clay. Mastery of possibility, mastery of essence, is exactly what Blue pursues. Thus, Blue comes to prize knowledge. It is with knowledge that Blue will unlock great possibilities, and changes itself for the better. With all knowledge - omniscience - Blue can make itself perfect. 'White' White as a color is easy to define, to be clear, White puts value in the group, the community, and its civilization as a whole. White's ultimate goal is peace, harmony, and perfection — a world where everyone gets along and no one seeks to disturb the bonds of unity that White had worked so long to forge. To govern and protect its community, White makes use of and puts value in a number of broad concepts; morality (ethics, religion), order (law, discipline), uniformity (conformity), and structure (government, planning). One can view White as a large clock tower composed of many cogs, which is structured rigidly to the point that there is no room for divergence or deviation, and on the outside looks striking, beautiful, strong, and glorious, attempting to make others want to come into its fold and under its wing. White seems to say "Look at us, we're doing great in here, nothing could be better. Come join us, come be a part of this magnificence." Inside, every cog is content with its job, because its job is no more important than any other cog's job, and each cog is kept entertained by what it's supposed to do. However, not one cog can see outside those walls to see what the grass on the other side of the fence is like, so they won't ever know if they're truly happy as they can be. To the cynical on the outside of the tower, they recognize it as a symbol of fascism, lack of individuality or divergence, oppressive, and generally no fun. 'Green' Green is the color most in tune with nature. Whereas the other colors seek to modify the world around them, green believes that the best course of action is to simply allow nature to take its course. Thus, green is often seen as the least confrontational of the colors: it does not seek to impose its values on others; it just wants to coexist as peacefully as possible. This does not mean that green will not defend itself when it feels threatened, but it generally will not seek to impose its opinion on others. Green therefore also places value on the concept of community. Although it does not take this as far as white does, green sees intrinsic value in coming together for the benefit of the whole group. It draws this example from nature, having observed such examples as the way that bees gather pollen from flowers to make honey and in doing so allow the flowers to cross pollinate, or the way that thallids produce saprolings, which in turn nourish the thallids again, embodying the circle of life. Green communities seek to live in the same harmonious way, taking only what they need from others and giving back to them in due course. 'Multicolored' All colours can mix and match, and create new ideals. At this point your character is now Multicolored. While this does present its own advantages, it also dilutes the core tenets of the colours used within. This is ever more evident with three-coloured characters who will always seem conflicted or too general with their dreams. Some examples of Multicolored characters includes the Royal Judgee, White and Blue who values laws and the inner bureaucratic actions required to achieve such laws. It also includes the Reveler, Red and Black who just wants to have a good time, even though that good time may end in cold blooded murder. A good way to understand the Multicolored tenets is to read how Alara and Ravnica work within themselves. The former being a plane split in five (Bant, Esper , Grixis , Jund and Naya ), with three colours per shard and the latter that is a planewide city host to the ten, two-coloured guilds binded by the Guildpact. A Multicolored character can be created at level one, and a third colour may be chosen at level five. But unless it represents your characters desires or dreams, it is not recomended as it "waters down" the advantages of each colour similar to multi-classing compared to sticking to one or two classes. 'Colorless' The tenets of a colorless character is that they have none, only machines and those who surpass emotion itself would represent themselves as colorless. Things such as Golems, Automatons and other living artefacts are the most common (by a wide margin) form of sentient Colorless characters. Only a select few characters, such as Ugin or Sorin have a mastery over the rare art of Colorless magic. It is impossible for a character to begin as a colorless without being an appropriate race. 'Premise' Now final regrouped, the known survivors of the Oriv trek out with the Witin, a mysterious wizard whos looks reveal more history then any book in any library. The Quindecennial is near, and its servants seek the end of the lowest of the pirate lords. Who is this man? Will the heroes rise to greatness, or fall so very low. 'Nations' These nations are the most pressing, and the closest to the home region, which you will start in. They all start with some degree of claims on nearby land or claims on land you would control. 'Ashka Riverlords' Historically, the Ashka and Tzeinte people are ingrained into the culture of Otrojedanaest. Before the River Wars, the two peoples lived with a union forged by the ancient marriages of Queen Kerihe Ashka and King Olten of Duch. Recently a power struggle between two brothers has formed two separate nations, the Ashka and Tzeinte Riverlords. Utilising highly mobile cavalry, and a strict adherence to a code of Loot means the Riverlords are not only a danger to themselves, but to the other neighbouring regions. 'Tzeinte Riverlords' Like the Ashka Riverlords, the Tzeinte were formed due to a conflict of interest between two brothers claiming the throne of the Riverlands. Like the Ashka, the Tzeinte prefer highly mobile cavalry forces and hit-and-run tactics, as well as a fair share of looting whether Ashka or otherwise. Out of the two factions, the Tzeinte are the only one to actually have access to the sea, allowing mercenaries from The Holdings and Eleven Lords to syphon through the ports of Hinte. 'The Ruvenian Kingdom' A majestic kingdom home to bloodline of the Duch, with claims on both the Duchic League and the Riverlands. Its history is deeply rooted upon the continent, first starting as a colony of the Edirendra Empire and later being captured by the Conichras. After many years of independence, the Ruvenites have formed many bonds to its parental nations, but seek to expand their glory to all of Otrojedanaest. They utilise disciplined, and numerous foot soldiers trained in traditional line combat. They are famous due to the Order of the Red Lion, a knighthood that continue to serve faithfully and without any remorse to Ruvenias enemies. 'Duchic League' After the Great Ruvenite Schism, the Duchic League had suceeded a large portion of the Ruvenian Kingdoms land. Fed up with the king, the various lords allied themselves and began a revolution which allow them to occupy large swathes of land, cutting off the Ruvenites from a major source of wealth and prestege. The inner workings of the League are complicated, but seem to resemble a confederation of various settlements not managed by a king. 'The Holdings of Eferin' A coastal kingdom with many island holdings, led by the seemingly ageless king Eferin of Laztaz. They utilise their mighty shipyards and political connections to almost single-handedly control all trade, in or out. They fight a constant seabourne war against the Eleven Lords, ruthless pirates who continue to disrupt the Holdings trade to the major civilizations. 'The Eleven Lords' Followers of the Quindecennial, an event every 15 years that claims the life of the weakest lord. They differ from most other factions, in that they are led by criminals, thugs and lowlife scum that loosely adhere to a code of chivalry. Generally regarded as a menance, they will stop at nothing to continue the event of the Quindecennial, if it means death to more then one lord. 'Races' Most races immigrated to the continent, though some such as the Hellacaen and Vilrad have been there for many years. These are the most common or prolific races upon the continent. Aven Ehl Ehl, Hellacaen Half-Ehl Half-Murje Halfling Human Kor Murje Pangollian Surrakar Vilrad 'Regions' 'The Riverlands' A dangerous concoction of flood plains, rushing water and sparse forests. Seemingly benign, the wildlife of the Riverlands are large and dangerous. Home to the hardy Ashka and Tzeinte peoples, master riders and expert gunners that have stood uncontested for hundreds of years. Due to the dangerous fauna, sparse fortresses dot the landscape, with contantly patrolled farmland. While they are few in number, the fortresses themselves are not a mockery. As for many years of defending the borders of the Riverlands from the Duchic people have hardened the noble riders into expert architects and siegemasters. A common phrase in the Riverlands is "Its not the rider, nor his gun that kills you, its the heat. Heat and the women" People of the Riverlands are known to be proud, and they make sure it is visible with colourful clothing and armour made with the finest of cloth and metal. Appealing to this pride, may allow them to be more easy to deal with. 'Upper Duch' The Upper Duchic region is the centre of arts and trade within the Ruvenian Kingdom, its calm seas and plentfiul wavelords allow for diverse cultures to flourish. The geography includes large forests, mountains and the eastern desert. Upper Duch is thought to be the origin of the Duchic people, due to the oldest city Holkaeros sitting upon its shores. Various documents point to the Edirendra Empire and the Conichran Isles as early influences in literature and its martial culture. While the region is home to much wealth, it is also rife with pretenders and traitors, as well as criminals around every corner. Wealth has brought nothing but misery to the region, corrupting it from the inside. Constant infighting, within the courts and out upon the fields of battle have created a delicate, political standoff that seems to slowly kill the once almighty Duchic League. People of the Upper Duch region are tactful and wily, but will always answer to a universal gift of good faith, coin. Even the lowest beggar will spill his guts for a simple coin. 'Major Characters' 'Captain Herononus Kade' A man whos life experience is something no scribe can write down in a day, with an early history in the Ahoman Navy, serving in the many wars that followed. He is a cheerful man, with a sense of world weariness and courage, though after his short retirement no one knows where he went. He is currently assumed missing or dead after the Crash. 'Cincada' Heronomus Kade's Shipmage and close friend. Despite Cincadas gruff and serious attitude, they talk and laugh with each other as if they were friends for many years. He is an oddity, with mannerisms and an accent straight from the Adieceans. He prefers guns and conventional fighting over magick, preferring hard results over chance. Cincada's personality is quite jarring to onlookers, with a brash and quick-to-the-point tone. His talent in magick and guns is strange for one of such a young age. He is armed with three pistols, and an expert knowledge of magick. He has various knives in conspicuous locations. 'Vicril the Sandwalker' A brutal minotaur lord that has usurped the local throne and through sheer will and intimidation has managed to lead armies of the corrupt and the weak into battle. He plans on invading the riverlands from his new power base of Araesantine. He is the descendant of one of the most feared beings in recent history. Kanatos, his father, had ransacked almost the entire Riverlands and large swathes of Duchic land. He seeks to reclaim the glory of his father, and crush all who get in his way. 'Patriae Aghanos' The son of a powerful Tzeinte Riverlord, he is tasked to take back Araesantine from the Sandwalker, no matter the cost. He appears noble, but rumours float that he is a womanizer and prays to a different pantheon then his own people. His company does not help his protests to such claims, but he seems to like the Confidants company, as they seemingly plot behind closed doors. 'The Dark Confidant' A man that seems to always acompany Patriae during his war meetings, his quiet smirks commonly offend the young lords allies and friends. Patriae claims he is his court wizard, but he is never seen doing his duties. His dark eyes and presence is enough to unease even the wisest commander or the most stern of kings. 'Setting Information' The setting of Solaere is very different from most others, in that magic and divinity is the force that blocks technological and idealogical advancement. Though despite this, many philosophers and enlightened despots dot major centres of culture, trade and power. Following is the history, and then the major cultures of the world. A short history of Solaere